Page:Sir Thomas Browne's works, volume 3 (1835).djvu/407

 we should rather expect its verification from analogy in that language, than to confine the same unto the unconcerned letters of Greece, or make it out by the characters of Cadmus or Palamedes.

Of this quincuncial ordination the ancients practised much, discoursed little; and the moderns have nothing enlarged; which he that more nearly considereth, in the form of its square rhombus, and decussation, with the several commodities, mysteries, parallelisms, and resemblances, both in art and nature, shall easily discern the elegancy of this order.

That this was in some ways of practice in divers and distant nations, hints or deliveries there are from no slender antiquity. In the hanging gardens of Babylon, from Abydenus, Eusebius, and others, Curtius describeth this rule of decussation. In the memorable garden of Alcinous, anciently conceived an original fancy from Paradise, mention there is of well contrived order; for so hath Didymus and Eustachius expounded the emphatical word. Diomedes describing the rural possessions of his father, gives account in the same language of trees orderly planted. And Ulysses being a boy, was promised by his father forty fig-trees, and fifty rows of vines producing all kinds of grapes.

That the eastern inhabitants of India made use of such order, even in open plantations, is deducible from Theophrastus; who, describing the trees whereof they made their garments, plainly delivereth that they were planted ϰατ' ὄρχους, and in such order that at a distance men would mistake them for vineyards. The same seems confirmed in Greece from a singular expression in Aristotle concerning the order of vines, delivered by a military term representing the orders of soldiers, which also confirmeth the antiquity of this form yet used in vineal plantations.

That the same was used in Latin plantations is plainly